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Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years
An anonymous reader writes with bad, but not unexpected news: "The U.S. soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. Last week, he apologized for hurting the U.S. and for 'the unexpected results' of his actions. He will receive credit for three and a half years, but be dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army."
Considering today news is breaking about the NSA monitoring 75% of all domestic US internet traffic, and logging all domestic emails, as well as their plans for a national facial recognition system (as in live video feeds), it seems obvious to me that they sentenced him today and announced it in this way in an effort to distract us from what really matters.
Sources: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-has-access-75-percent-us-internet-traffic-says-wsj-6C10967780
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/us/facial-scanning-is-making-gains-in-surveillance.html?_r=0
"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."
The United States government is the largest criminal organization in the world. Bradley Manning exposed some of the war crimes routinely committed by the United States. That, in and of itself, makes him a hero. It takes no courage to invade another country that is drastically weaker than you are and to then shoot people (mostly civilians) who are simply defending their country from foreign invaders. It takes a lot of courage to stand up to the Imperial US Government.
You feel that because of some twisted nationalistic pride and unquestioning faith that the overlords are benevolent, know what they're doing, and are above the vast swaths of historical abuse by similar authority figures. We feel he's been unfairly treated because of a lot of things.
1) He exposed a whole hell of a lot of people doing "forbidden" things. Most of whom are never going to face prison time, courts, fines or even a slap on the wrist.
2) The people he's exposing have previously concealed their wrongdoing. Gaming the system of justice is serious infraction. It's often worse than what they're hiding.
3) The people he's exposing have a vast amount of political power and very much have control over his punishment. I don't think it's a stretch to say that they're abusing their power and being vindictive.
4) He's been tortured. Not the sort of torture with massive blood loss, hideous scars, and severed limbs, but the sort of torture you get in a lab setting. And it looks like it was enough to break him.
Yes, he should face consequences for violating orders and exposing secrets. And he should face praise and leniency for making the USA a better place and upholding his oath. You know, to protect the nation from threats from within.
If he'd been smart enough to send the war crime data, and ONLY that, to the Hague etc then he'd likely have fared better than by doing a bulk data dump which included so much material he couldn't have checked it all.
Reactions to Manning seem to be dictated by the ideology of the beholder rather than what he actually did.
I don't find him either a hero or a villian, just a young troop with serious personal issues who went attention-whoring without thinking it through despite his training.
I'm also not sure that what he released wasn't salted with items which allowed those doing the salting to further their own agenda. Hammering Manning would confirm everything he dumped in the eyes of the world. He'd have been easy to exploit.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I agree with you. I don't leave the current administration out of my condemnation. The Granai airstrike that Manning leaked happened under Obama and many innocent civilians were killed. But my understanding is that the bulk of what Bradley Manning leaked occurred under the Bush years. I'm not trying to claim that Obama and co. are innocent of war crimes. They are not.
Well because it was a shit-ton better before Bush. Back then the USA was riding high after the cold war and the worst that the president did was have an affair. Or raise taxes after promising not to. Or have an ill-conceived tax reform. Or just kinda not get much done. Or a crook who abused his position to spy on his political adversaries. And that was bad. Seriously bad. A stain upon our history. And that's getting to about the extent of our memory. I had to google who was president before Nixon, and I had forgotten about Carter. Sorry, there's only so much history I have at the tip of my mind.
Let me make this perfectly clear. Bush was FAR WORSE then ALL OF THAT. He took an emotionally unstable first-world super-power in a post-9/11 trauma and decided to invade Iraq. He lead us into a quagmire that cost a shit-ton of money, got a (historically small) number of US troops killed, got a SHIT-TON of civilians killed, and didn't have much to show for it all except something to put on his mantle and funneling billions of dollars to his friends. Let me repeat that: He pre-emptivly invaded a nation. He started a war based on a lie. He was objectively a far worse president than anything in the last 50 years, doing absolutely retarded things that damaged this nation and brought about hardship to us all.
Before Nixon is the long long ago where we had an idiot that double-downed on Vietnam. Or the guy who thought make-work would fix the economy. Or the asshole who thought sitting on his hands would keep it all from falling apart. And to be fair to Bush, Vietnam was worse, although LBJ didn't exactly start the whole thing. The atrocities that the CIA did in the name of fighting the commies was probably worse. Arguably it lead to 9/11, but that's almost a philosophical debate at this point.
The Obama administration has some originality you know.
Yeah, even Bush didn't straight up openly assasinate US citizens. That's a new terror. But most of this bullshit with surveillance really got going under Bush with the excuse that it was to fight the terrorists after 9/11. Obama certainly picked that up and is running with it, but we can still lay a portion of that blame at Bush's feet.
"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Manning."
what crimes?
Child prostitution -SOMEONE at Dyncorp and the US government for employing them to do so.
Blackmail -SOMEONE at Pfizer.
Smuggling -SOMEONE at Chevron.
Espionage Hilary Clinton and the State department.
It goes on and on. It's almost as if there's a systematic flaw that's so pervasive it's hard to see the trees for the forest. Seriously, haven't you looked at any of this?
"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Snowden."
it's on going, and he uncovered very few crimes.
Perjury - James Clapper.
Illegal warrantless espionage against US citizens on US soil. And no, FISA is not looking over their shoulder.
As a culture we haven't even decided if information sent though multiple servers around the globe IS private.
Yet as a legal body we HAVE decided that email is private for the first 180 days. At least by US law. And we're pretty damn sure even as an amorphous cultural body of billions of people that encrypted communications is private, so suck it.
You can try to refute all that citation (and hey, some of it might even be off), but you'd best bring a big-ass list of citeable sources and have a DAMN good argument for why I shouldn't believe what appears to be really bloody obvious to me.
>Manning's disclosure was so very indiscriminate.
How so? He delivered information to an investigative media source to be examined, considered, and redacted before responsible publication - like most every responsible whistle-blower has done in recent ages. It's really hard for a man on the ground to decide what is or isn't relevant, they lack the perspective, and generally have a potentially very narrow window of opportunity between when they grab as much possibly incriminating data as they can and when that fact is noticed and they are silenced.
The only reason that a flood of unredacted information hit the public was because one of the handful of journalists given access to the data was grossly irresponsible and published the information necessary to access it directly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Even one crime is too many.
I do not give a damn how few crimes were uncovered. Every last one of them should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, especially in a high leverage position such as a government official that can do a lot more damage with corruption than a mere citizen can.
In fact, I would suggest that crimes by government officials should have higher priority precisely for this reason. A corrupt official is dangerous to society just like a terrorist or criminal is.
Our Congressional representatives pass 2,000 page legislation after 1 hour without even bothering to glance at it, let alone read it. Yet their laws govern America. Do you really think Manning deserves 35 years in prison for being "indiscriminate"?
Eavesdropping without probable cause is a crime. Issuing warrants that do not specifically describe the places to be searched or things to be seized is a crime. The NSA cannot even abide by the unconstitutionally lax privacy rules it sets for itself, breaking those rules over 2000 times per year. Every one of those overreaches is a violation of the CFAA, those NSA analysts deserve the same treatment Aaron Swartz got.
Given the scope of the NSA, I'm surprised it's only 2k/year.
Somehow it's private when one individual reads the emails of Sarah Palin, but when the NSA reads all of our emails it's not private anymore?
Have I fallen behind on what the NSA has been accused of doing? I thought they weren't so much reading our emails as collecting transmission information - the equivalent of reading the to/from addresses on everything we snail-mail. Collecting WHO we talk to, not what we're talking about. I still think it should be a violation without some sort of warrant, but it's not quite as bad.
The echo chamber is within the US government. Espionage against US citizens is forbidden by the constitution. That the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have all conspired against the American people to ignore the constitution doesn't change that fact.
Given that it seems that most of the western-style governments seem to be in on it as well, the echo chamber is quite a bit bigger. Consider that the UK government has gotten involved in hushing up parts of the Snowden leaks. The NSA cooperates.
I don't read AC A human right
While it may not be important, knowing who all your presidents have been, at least as far back as it matters (WW2) is something you should be expected to know. Probably not your fault per se, I understand your education system kind of sucks. But I can name all your country's presidents from FDR onwards, and I'm British. I bet you wouldn't know where to begin naming our prime ministers since Churchill.
So what? Well, if you know that much, you'll probably also be aware of much of the history that goes with it, and that really does matter. For one thing, all this shit that's coming to light just now and the terrible injustice we've seen today might just stir up a bit more outrage than it is doing. What was WW2 and the Cold War and all those hard lessons about communist paranoia about if not to create nations that were better than that? Waste of time and countless lives, evidently.
Those who fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
"He has taken what Bush did further than Bush ever dreamed "
that is completely false. Frankly, it's getting old and has been factual shot down 1000 times.
Obama did expand drone strikes in his first year in office. He did assassinate American citizens, which Bush didn't dare do. You cannot say that statement is completely false.
I think Obama is actually more dangerous than Bush. Bush was a bit of a buffoon; a caricature of a Texas cowboy or a "Joe Everyman" (neither are accurate, but that's how he presents himself. Obama comes across as more refined, more intelligent, more compassionate. He promised transparency, an end to Gitmo, and a renewed focus on diplomacy over military intervention. The current president won a Nobel Peace Prize as the world hoped he'd be the change he preached! But, by his actions, he is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I blame myself too. I voted for Obama, twice. The second time I did so with my nose pinched shut. When our broken system gives you two choices, "bad" and "worse", then sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do the practical thing rather than the right one. I didn't vote in 2000 because both candidates were flawed,and sometimes I think that the many of us who abstained from the process during that election set the stage for a lot of the mess that we're in today as a nation.
Manning released over 10,000 documents.
Manning conveyed over 10,000 documents to journalists. Of course, his treatment will compel future whistle-blowers to release their shit anonymously, and unedited. This is what we, as a society, will get for letting our secret police to attack the free press, but it's a small price to pay for a functional democracy.
Also, let's not forget that Manning had not only the right but the legal duty to disobey illegal orders. Unfortunately "illegal" is, in this case, determined by the war criminals in charge. But rest assured that if we were to lose a war right now, most of the people in charge of both the political and corporate systems this country would be (rightly) hanged. Manning is among the (very) few who can at least say "I did what I could to stop this..."
Your personal reading of the 4th amendment is neat and all, but the SCOTUS' reading is the one that matters, legally, and those guys are nothing if not creative. We're in a sorry situation, to be sure, but "plain reading" of the constitution is grounds only for moral outrage, not claims of illegality.
That's exactly the conspiracy against the constitution to which I referred.
Of course a plain reading is what matters. The Constitution is only valid because it was ratified by common people, people like you and me who speak plain English. The only basis for just government is consent of the people, and consent is only valid if it's informed consent. The People cannot provide informed consent to anything other than plain English. If the Constitution is not meant to be read in plain English, it has no legitimacy at all, and every government act is therefore a crime.
And anyhow, the 4th isn't a law.
It's not just a law, it's the highest law of the land.
Laws are made by congress, and stand unless a particular law is not to the personal taste of enough of the SCOTUS
Congress has the power to make laws only because it is granted by the people, via the Constitution. Congress has no authority to pass laws that violate the constitution. They can try, but that doesn't make it a law. It has the exact same legal standing as "laws" issued directly from my ass.
What you are describing here is not the rule of law, on which all civil society is formed. What you are describing is arbitrary government by men. Under your logic, all a corrupt executive has to do is pack the supreme court with his cronies, and nothing in the Constitution matters.
That is essentially what you are arguing for.
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